Deaths on Tracks Exact Heavy Toll for Conductors

San Diego-based Amtrak locomotive engineer Leonard Robidoux will forever be thankful for the time a co-worker embraced him.

It didn't come after Robidoux' 1,000th run, or his 10th anniversary with the company, or after the birth of a child.

It came the morning after Robidoux' train struck and killed a suicidal woman who had positioned her car directly in the path of his locomotive. Robidoux is still haunted by that experience and clearly remembers the color of her eyes: blue.

"I knew it would happen sooner or later," said Robidoux. "But I didn't know what it would be like until it did happen. The wobbly knees, the shaky voice--it was a feeling I'd never had before."

The next morning, two other locomotive engineers met him for breakfast. "Normally, they're kind of stoic and macho, but they opened themselves up to me, talked about their incidents, helped me accept what happened.

"Then one of them gave me a hug. A supportive embrace. I didn't expect it from him. But it really helped."

This angel in steel-toed work boots was a fellow railroader who previously had been at the throttle of a locomotive that had killed. He provided the empathy that a professional therapist could not.

With increasing frequency, railroads today are dispatching co-workers to the scenes of trackside fatalities, to help engineers, conductors and other train crew members deal with the sense of guilt, the anger and the grief of becoming unwilling attendants to death.

They are called peer counselors in some circles, peer supporters in others, and professional therapists say they offer the most effective, genuine and comforting support for stricken engineers.

The need for them is unrelenting. Of the estimated 30,000 locomotive engineers around the nation, one in six was involved in an accident last year--and one in 30 witnessed a fatality, according to railroad industry and government statistics.

Around the country last year, in fact, a locomotive engineer was 15 times more likely to be involved in a trackside death than a Los Angeles police officer was to be involved in a fatal shooting.

"There are two kinds of railroad engineers," says Amtrak's Chuck Glick. "The ones who have hit people and the ones who are going to hit people."

Indeed, there is growing awareness that, for each of the hundreds of people who are struck nationwide each year by trains, there are an equal number of forgotten victims: the engineers.